SternisheFan writes: By Becky Bratu, NBC News: The killer storm that hit the East Coast last month and left the nation's largest city with a crippled transit system, widespread power outages and severe flooding has resurfaced the debate about how best to protect a city like New York against rising storm surges.
In a 2011 report called "Vision 2020: New York City Comprehensive Waterfront Plan," NYC's Department of City Planning listed restoring degraded natural waterfront areas, protecting wetlands and building seawalls as some of the strategies to increase the city’s resilience to climate change and sea level rise."Hurricane Sandy is a wake-up call to all of us in this city and on Long Island," Malcolm Bowman, professor of physical oceanography at State University of New York at Stony Brook, told NBC News' Richard Engel. "That means designing and building storm-surge barriers like many cities in Europe already have."
Some of the projects showcased at Rising Currents include: Ways to make the surfaces of the city more absorptive (through porous sidewalks) and more able to deal with water, whether coming from the sea or sky; Parks and freshwater and saltwater wetlands in Lower Manhattan; Artificial islands or reefs (including ones made of recycled glass) to make the shoreline more absorptive and break the waves.